It’s one of those debates people love to argue at parties and in classrooms: What came first? The chicken or the egg? Since chickens come from eggs, it almost seems logical the egg came first, but when you think about it, the egg had to be laid somehow, so it must have been the chicken. Right?

Trying to figure it out makes my head spin, but thanks to science, I don’t need to hash it out anymore. A team of scientists from Warwick and Sheffield Universities put their minds together to finally answer the age-old chicken and egg debate. Their answer just may shock you… or confirm what you’ve always believed to be the only answer possible.

With the use of an amazing super computer called HECTOR (High End Computing Terascale Resource), the science team broke down the components of the egg’s shell. Their research began in effort to understand how chickens create shells for their young so we as humans can one day reproduce this fascinating natural process.

The team discovered a natural protein called ovocledidin-17 that can only be found in a chicken’s ovaries. Inside the ovaries, the protein works to assemble the shell piece by piece in preparation for the baby chicks. Since this is the first process in forming a baby chicken, and it can only take place inside a chicken’s ovaries, science has deemed the chicken itself had to come first.

Well snap! Now what am I going to talk about at parties? You’re probably wondering the same thing, but have no fear, my science savvy friends. You can still debate… or at least keep the conversation going. Know why? Because science still has no idea where this first chicken could have come from.

You can even shift the conversation toward dinosaurs, which some people still like to insist never existed in the first place (despite the fact that we’ve all seen their bones at the museum.) Scientists believe the chicken may have been related to an egg-laying dinosaur, so the real answer to the question–What came first? The chicken or the egg?–is neither chicken, nor egg, but dinosaur!

And we all know birds look like mini-dinosaurs with feathers. In fact, I was watching chickens peck around the neighbor’s pond the other day. Having just watched Jurassic Park over the weekend, all I could think about was how much they looked like tiny, feather-covered velociraptors. Scary, I know. I just hope there isn’t some crazy billionaire scientist somewhere with an amber walking stick planning to spawn a bunch of dinosaurs on an island and charging admission.

So now you know. The chicken came first, and anyone who tries to tell you different, you tell them you’ve got proof. Then send them over to read this article if they continue trying to argue with you.